“What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?” - Fuckzuck

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

The feed was generated by an algorithm but moderated by a team of about
25 people with backgrounds in journalism. If the word “Trump” was
trending, as it often was, they used their news judgment to identify
which bit of news about the candidate was most important.

If The Onion
or a hoax site published a spoof that went viral, they had to keep that
out. If something like a mass shooting happened, and Facebook’s
algorithm was slow to pick up on it, they would inject a story about it
into the feed. Facebook prides itself on being a place where people love to work. But
Fearnow and his team weren’t the happiest lot.

They were contract
employees hired through a company called BCforward, and every day was
full of little reminders that they weren’t really part of Facebook.
Plus, the young journalists knew their jobs were doomed from the start.
Tech companies, for the most part, prefer to have as little as possible
done by humans—because, it’s often said, they don’t scale. You can’t
hire a billion of them, and they prove meddlesome in ways that
algorithms don’t. They need bathroom breaks and health insurance, and
the most annoying of them sometimes talk to the press.

Eventually,
everyone assumed, Facebook’s algorithms would be good enough to run the
whole project, and the people on Fearnow’s team—who served partly to
train those algorithms—would be expendable.The day after Fearnow took that second screenshot was a Friday. When he
woke up after sleeping in, he noticed that he had about 30 meeting
notifications from Facebook on his phone. When he replied to say it was
his day off, he recalls, he was nonetheless asked to be available in 10
minutes. Soon he was on a video­conference with three Facebook
employees, including Sonya Ahuja, the company’s head of investigations.

According to his recounting of the meeting, she asked him if he had been
in touch with Nuñez. He denied that he had been. Then she told him that
she had their messages on Gchat, which Fearnow had assumed weren’t
accessible to Facebook. He was fired. “Please shut your laptop and don’t
reopen it,” she instructed him.

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I do not aim to please anyone. This is my blog, there is no blog like this. I am not mainstream. Read my disclaimer before posting comments and threatening me. Not to worry, I will not quiver in my boots. If you are not happy, no problem, just take a hike!!